caught in a bad romance
by The Seventh L
Summary: Maybe all people who do bad things are just really lonely. Subaru finds out just how lonely Seishirou really is. // Post-series; spoilers for entire manga series. Completely disregards the existence of X/1999. //


**A/N:** Written as a Christmas gift fic for azurekitsune on LJ.

* * *

He woke up one morning and felt a cold chill pass through his body. He crossed over to his bedroom window and found a half-empty pack of cigarettes on the ground, a smoldering butt of a cig letting off wisps of smoke into the air. When Subaru crushed the flimsy carton under his bare foot, he could not help but feel a little sad. He was destroying another piece of himself lost to Seishirou, their paths continually crossing then breaking apart like the traces of widening gyres. With one gloved hand, Subaru picked up the cigarette and held it close until it slowly lost what little warmth it had left.

For the millionth time since _that day_, Subaru told himself that everything would be better in the end.

It was still a lie.

He told himself that he loved Seishirou despite everything that had happened.

It was still true.

* * *

Subaru had been called to the scene of a local shrine by its head priest, an old friend of the Sumeragi family who needed the services of an onmyoji. Bundled up in his heavy coat and scarf, he trudged through the snow-covered steps only to be stopped in his tracks by a pink aberration fluttering past his cheek. He ran the rest of the way to the top and saw what he had been called in for: an over sized tree in the shrine's front yard, blooming with lightly colored cherry blossoms as if in the middle of the spring, littering the ground with its fallen petals.

Even with his gloves on, he could feel the warmth of the tree's unnatural presence through the thick trunk. It was an impossible thing, and now Subaru's job was to remove it. Right? He wondered stubbornly when the onmyoji had become tree loggers, then sighed, one foot scuffing across the ground and kicking up faint showers of white sparks. Subaru began to circle around the tree's base, studying it the best he could with just his own eyes. The snow created a circle of avoidance around the tree's base, revealing dead grass underneath the branches' shadows. Not a single flake of snow was on the tree; even the wind seemed to be doing its best to avoid the thing.

Subaru let his hand rest on the trunk of the tree again as he rooted through his bag for something that could possibly reveal the tree's origin, some tool of the trade he could use like a charm or an ofuda. Or even a magic watering can, for goodness' sake.

_'But today . . . I will let you go.'_

He jerked his hand back, feeling like he had been hit by a jolt of lightning, the sensation traveling up his arm and through his body with the familiar feeling of shock. His nose filled with the scent of cloves and dander. Right. He didn't even need to guess to know where this had come from. He wondered, briefly, what body Seishirou had buried under this tree to make the petals a deep pink.

With a quick scratch of pen on paper, Subaru summoned a bevy of shikigamis in the form of leaf spirits and prepared to expel the influence of the Sakurazukamori from the cursed tree. The movements of his hands, the concentration needed to form the proper sequence of spells --- they all kept his focus trained away from the _why_ of the situation. Work was work; he left his emotions at home when he was on the job. It had not always been this way, he thought. It didn't have to.

Even in his apartment, the smell of cloves lingered on his body. Subaru could not bring himself to wash it away with special salts. It was another part of himself he had lost to Seishirou's selfish bet, and to his own foolish beliefs.

* * *

He woke up one morning and knew he wasn't alone. A man in a dark suit with a lit cigarette between his fingers sat at the foot of his bed. There was no indication of how long he'd been there.

Seishirou smiled. "Good morning." Subaru didn't know whether to clock the man in the face with a balled-up fist or fall with relative abandon into his arms. Both choices were terribly non-constructive.

So he fell into Seishirou's arms, pressed his face into his broad shoulder, felt the man's arm wrap warmly around his body. He smelled cloves and smoke and snow on the man's clothes, and warms the older man's face with his hands. He's cold, so cold, but the warmth growing in Subaru's chest is enough for two. They pressed against each other eagerly, desperately, tugged at each other's bodies as if checking that the other is truly _all there_ and all right. Subaru slowly slipped off his shirt, looking at Seishirou, asking with his eyes for assistance and to feel his lover's hands on his body. Seishirou smiled wryly and began to comply, taking Subaru's hand in his and grasping the boy's shirt front with the other in an upward tugging motion.

Subaru pressed his gloved hand to Seishirou's chest and the man began burning; a slow fire spread past his fingers until it had enveloped all of Seishirou in a golden haze, his body bursting quietly into nothing more than a scorched paper doll with symbols on it. A paper doll, a shikigami; they were both the same thing really. The third one this month. Seishirou must be truly lonely to call on Subaru so many times in so many false bodies.

The young man lay awake, settling back onto the bed, and thought of the past. His hands reached out and touched the air where he imagined Seishirou would have been at that moment (hunched over his body, he supposed, hands at work removing the young boy's clothes, speaking of nothing but what could be and what could never come to pass) before withdrawing them slowly back to himself.

Then he reached over for the pack of cigarettes on his bedside table and effortlessly lit up the first of the day, telling himself that everything would be better in the end, some day.


End file.
